Broadening Your Bandwidth: Paint by Numbers

By Jay Akkerman

Max Klein didn’t have an artistic bone in his body. In fact, the only brush he ever held with much skill was his toothbrush. Nevertheless, his work has been displayed in such distinguished venues as the Smithsonian Institution and even the White House. But who is Max Klein?

In 1949 Klein owned Detroit’s Palmer Paint Company. He was also Dan Robbins’s boss. Unlike Klein, Robbins’s claim to fame was that he could at least draw a blank. In fact, he could draw well enough to outline a masterpiece such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. You see, Klein and Robbins were the creators of the CraftMaster paint-by-number kit. Their early 1954 re-creation of the Last Supper, designed to be painted in by the home artist, remains the most popular paint-by-number kit ever made. CraftMaster sold millions of paint-by-number kits in the years that followed. You may even have one hanging in your home, if not your garage!

When Klein and Robbins boastfully claimed, “A Beautiful Painting the First Time You Try,” they managed to deliver on their bold promise. By following the instructions included, many artistically challenged people discovered they could paint something worth hanging on their wall. In the end, millions of people felt as if they could actually live up to CraftMaster’s slogan: “Everyone a Rembrandt.”

I don’t know about you, but my natural inclinations as a preacher rarely lead me to think of myself in the same camp as Rembrandt, da Vinci, or for that matter, even Max Klein or Dan Robbins. By the same token, the challenge of faithfully communicating the message of Scripture in creative, compelling ways rests on all of us. Broadening your preaching bandwidth calls for a move today from the ear to also include the eye. It’s about a shift from words exclusively to images inclusively.

In a word, broadening your preaching bandwidth is about the power of metaphor. Visual metaphors. Graphic words. This Christmas season, we celebrate the birth of the world’s greatest metaphor: the Word made flesh. Isn’t that what the Incarnation is all about: God with skin on? Can it get more visual than that?

This season of the year, I’d like to challenge you to open the canvas of your preaching life up to the Master, perhaps in some new ways. Identify a single image that puts flesh on your text, and weave it into your preaching. Find a metaphor alive in your text, one that underscores your passage without overshadowing it. Be true to Scripture by letting it speak in its own terms on as many wavelengths as possible. As you do, I suspect you’ll find that little by little God can fill in the blank spaces, fashioning your preaching into something worth hanging in the living room of someone’s heart rather than just their garage.

Broaden your preaching bandwidth this Christmas, even if you don’t have the artistic talent of a Rembrandt, or even a Max Klein. Your preaching can still become a work of art in the hands of the Master. It’s just a matter of letting Him fill in the blanks one space at a time.

As teaching pastor of New Hope Church in Phoenix, Jay communicates each week using visual media. He can be reached at jay@lifepuzzle.org.